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GameTree Linux Is Trying To Be Its Own Steam-Like Platform

01-08-2011, 01:10 AM

Phoronix: GameTree Linux Is Trying To Be Its Own Steam-Like Platform

This morning we reported on the soft announcement that TransGaming would be replacing Cedega with something known as GameTree Linux. Not much information was available at the time, just that it was built upon Cedega technology, would replace the subscription-based Cedega Gaming Service, and would be distributed as a free program. Now though a few more details have come to light...

Steam is still coming to Linux with the Source Engine, which will immediately jump to the front, and Desura is also looking at possibly offering a Linux client too of its digital distribution system.

I am still amazed how sure you are about Steam coming to Linux, however if you go to desura.com you get a banner at the top saying they "are" working on a linux client and you can be notified. So I do see desura appear on linux before steam right now.

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On that same note, Valve really should be picking up steam on linux seeing as Desura seems to be jumping on it. (pun intended)

I just went to desura's page. Go there, and see the games list. They have 43 titles listed, almost half are just "if you have the game, click here to create a shortcut", and the rest are all small games.

I don't see Desura showing up on Valve's radar very soon... Don't get me wrong, it would be nice if Desura was multiplatform, but I'm not expecting any breakthroughs in linux gaming because of that.

Finally, Transgaming has previously had deals with EA, at least. And they have some interesting technologies, so if it works out and we have a decent game store with linux-supported games (even if they are using winex or cedega or whatever they call it these days), count me in.

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... however if you go to desura.com you get a banner at the top saying they "are" working on a linux client and you can be notified.

I was also excited to see that banner on the top when I joined! Unfortunately, going to their forums in this thread, it seems the actual status is more like "thinking about doing it, when it makes sense", than "we are working on it"..

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that Steam will support Linux before them

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I think there is something to be said for a company whose focus is to target specific games and, cooperating with the developers, manages to produce a tested, 100% functional "port" running on top of their emulation platform, be it Cedega or Wine or whatever. Let's see how the competition stacks up.

Wine has absolutely no support from 99.999% of the developers out there. Very few of them are actually willing to say "You can run our game under Wine, and we will make some degree of effort to make sure that our patches won't break support". Some developers are even anti-Wine, and running their game under an emulator (especially in multiplayer games) can be perceived as a means of cheating, because the game isn't guaranteed to be functionally equivalent to running on native Windows, and in fact you can modify wine's source quite easily to get some interesting results, like causing undesirable environmental effects such as smoke or fog to not be rendered.

To my knowledge, CodeWeavers does not get very much cooperation from game developers when they are trying to build in support for games. Even with Crossover Games, the only games that work are, essentially, games that CodeWeavers cares enough about to adjust their code so that it works with that game. This comes with zero guarantee that future patches will continue to work, and support for a game may well regress from version to version of Crossover. A professional subscription gives you some degree of assurance with applications that are rated gold or platinum by CodeWeavers, but that is still no guarantee that they will fix it in a reasonable amount of time if either a game patch or a Crossover update breaks compatibility.

The GameTree solution is much more interesting. With the explicit cooperation of -- nay, partnership with -- the developer, there is a very strong chance that:

(1) Each successive version of the Cedega engine will continue to fully support 100% of the games in the GameTree store,

(2) Each successive patch to the Windows game will continue to run 100% on the latest version of the Cedega engine.

The number of games supported may indeed be fewer due to the business practices of Transgaming (the very old wine fork) and the difficulty of getting game studios' cooperation (many of them don't think you can justify the cost of Linux support), but those games that are supported will likely run extremely well on fairly recent hardware using a proprietary driver such as ATI Catalyst or NVIDIA.

So to me, it seems that GameTree has a unique offering. The real questions will be: is the pricing model that Transgaming sets forth (for the development studios) going to be acceptable? How many engineering hours are the Transgaming staff going to try and suckle from the primary development team working on the Windows version of each game? How rigorous will Transgaming's testing of game features be, to ensure that players have a native or very near-native experience? If you buy a game on GameTree, do you also get the Windows version to run on native Windows?

The answers to these questions will determine the long-term success of GameTree. If they can keep their costs (to the game studios) down in the range of "peanuts", the engineering man hours from the developers down to "peanuts", and the quality-of-experience up to "near-native on recent ATI and Nvidia hardware with the binary blob", you'll probably see some degree of commercial success here. And customers will really appreciate it if licensed customers of the retail version get free access to the GameTree Linux version, while also going in the reverse; i.e., if you buy it on GameTree you also get to run the same game on Windows if you choose.

I can see how this idea has potential. The challenge will be in making the Cedega software robust enough for the porting effort to be kept to a manageable level, both for the game studio developers and for the Cedega developers. If entire new APIs have to be supported for every game that comes out, the costs incurred will cause the project to collapse in on itself unless they gather up enough momentum that the number of popular APIs lacking support tails off.

It's really a min-max problem, and I don't think we can judge the success or failure of the effort until we've seen it in action. It sounds really good on paper, but we need to see how it will pan out in practice, and this will largely depend upon the managerial and technical skills of the Transgaming team working on this project.

IMHO this article I've just written is a much fairer and more balanced assessment of the situation than what Michael has written, but YMMV...